Kaliarda III: The Romani basis of Kaliarda

NOTE: Updates on The Romani basis of Kaliarda, updated.

What Petropoulos had not picked up on in his first edition was that the base of the distinctive lexicon of Kaliarda is Romani—something that he had emended by the second edition.

There is precedent for a Romani base in other Greek cants—notably the builders’ cant Dortika in Eurytania, which Manolis Triantafyllidis published on in 1923.¹

In his magisterial post but—or, the influences of Romani on Kaliarda, slang.gr user Poniroskilo has compared Petropoulos’ vocabulary against the ROMLEX database of Romani dialects and I. Alexiou’s dictionary of Romani, and come up with the following list of core Romani vocabulary in Kaliarda. (I’m adding a column for Dortika, though Triantafyllidis did not publish a lot of his material, and his published article only went through words starting with mu.)

Kaliarda	Romani	Dortika
aˈvelo give, take, do, put, take out, want, have	avel, avela, avol be, become, come, arrive
ðiˈkelo see, look; dik look	dikhel see, look, inspect
irakˈlja woman, iraklo buxom woman	rakli, rakhli non-Roma girl
ˈkakna, kakˈni chicken	khajni chicken
kaliarˈda Greek gay cant < kaliarˈdos ugly, evil, strange	kaljardo black, African, blackened, dishonoured < kalo black
kaˈtes, kaˈte that	kate, kathe here
kuˈlo turd, shit	khul turd, shit
kuraˈvelta sex, kuraˈvelo to have sex as a top	kuřipe sex, kurela to have sex
laˈtsos beautiful, good	lačho good, beautiful
luˈbina gay	lubni, lumbi, lumli whore, slut
manˈdo bread	manro, mandro bread	manˈdo
mol water, liquid, alcoholic drink	mol wine	mol wine
muˈdzo vagina	mindž vagina, vulgar word for girl or girlfriend > English minge
balaˈmo middle-aged client of male prostitute	balamo, balamno boss, judge, non-Roma; in Sepeči Romani dialect (Volos): ethnic Greek	balaˈmos man, human; boss, householder
baˈros, baˈlos fat	baro big, tall	baˈros big
but very	but very, many	but very
peˈle testicle	pelo, pl. pele testicles
ˈpuli anus	bul arse
puˈros old	phuro old, grandfather
ˈrelo fart	ril fart (in the Sepeči Romani dialect of Volos)
tekˈno boy, young man, small	tikno small, dainty
tiraˈxo shoe	tirax shoe (in the Sepeči Romani dialect of Volos)
ˈdzazo drive out, leave, flee	džal, džala, džal-tar leave, depart, distance oneself, go	ˈdzala leave!
tsurˈno theft, especially of the wallet of a top by the bottom’s friend hiding under the bed	čor thief, robber
ˈxalo eat	xal, hal eat	xaljon

(The multivalent verbs avelo and dzazo are light verbs, a type common in the borrowing of verbs into other languages: nouns are easier to borrow than verbs, so languages often borrow the nouns, and use vague verbs like “do” with them. In fact, contemporary Greek does that routinely with online communication verbs taken from English notions: κάνω subscribe, κάνω add, κάνω like.)

In his 2005 study², César Montoliu concludes that “Kaliardá is not a mixed Gypsy language. It is rather a slang or a professional jargon with an important Romani element in it.” Poniroskilo also cites Sofronis Chatzisavvidis of Thessalonica University (article no longer online) as saying that 15% of the Kaliarda vocabulary is Romani.

Montoliu adds his hypothesis “that it first appeared in a Romani speaking environment connected with male prostitution.” The smoking gun is in fact in Poniroskilo’s list, in the entry for balamo, as slang.gr commenter Vrastaman was delighted to realise:

Vrastaman: I always wondered where the dick [πού στον πούτσο] those two communities intersected. I never realised the obvious, that they intersected on dick! You found the missing link under balamo which explains everything. Respect!

Iron: It’d also be interesting to make a list of those words which have ended up in everyday Greek slang: τεκνό, πουρό, τζάζω, λουμπίνα, κουλό etc.

• tekˈno “toyboy, twink”,
• puˈro “dirty old man”,
• ˈdzazo “to send away, to get rid of”,
• luˈbina, variously defined on slang.gr “whore” (explained here as derived from the pseudonym of a well-paid female sex worker of the 1930s—clearly itself taken from the Romani for “whore”), “gay bottom”, and “cunning and conniving”,
• kuˈlo Kaliarda: “turd”; Standard Greek slang has meanings derived from its normal meaning “lame”: “nonsensical, unreasonable” (possibly independently from English lame); “left hand” in Koutsavakika—although one commenter speculates that the meaning “nonsense” derives from Kaliarda

John Black: Obviously, Vrasta. Gays would give 20 drachmas to a horny Gypsy kid, or buy him a cheese pie, and he’d stick it in them (τους τον φέρμαρε). See Giannaris’ classic film From the Edge of the City, although the male prostitutes in that film are ex-Soviet Pontic Greeks (ρουπούδες), not Roma.

• John Black’s ρουπούδες is an acronym, using the unofficial Greek syllabic alphabet: ρου που = ΡΠ = Ρωσσο-Πόντιοι “Russian Pontians”.